There is nothing worse than computer problems, and there’s nothing better than free software to prevent them in the first place.

One of my favorite utilities of all time, Winpatrol,  has just updated to their 2008 version, and the company owner has provided me with an affiliate version that I can give away at no charge.

I used to have a computer repair store in Portland, and our shop fixed anywhere from 30 to 60 computers a week that people brought in from various problems. Additionally, we did a lot of on-site service too, dealing with small businesses, setting up networks, file sharing etc.

While some of the computer work that got done was upgrading or replacing components, the vast majority of our work had to do with “problems”, meaning Windows just wasn’t behaving the way it was supposed to.

Nine out of ten times the problem was not with Windows, but with third-party software that had been unknowingly starting up on the user’s system, sucking up all their available memory.

Whether that software was spyware, or a legitimate piece of software that simply attached itself to the Windows startup process, making the computer run more efficiently always involved removing these startup programs from memory.

As far back as 1998 I was writing articles not only about the search engines, but about how to improve performance on your computer, and even how to be your own IT department. A few years ago a local consultant named Steve Shank told me about a program called Winpatrol, and as soon as I tried it I was hooked.

Everything about Winpatrol is designed to give the user complete control over what runs and what doesn’t run on your system, so you can maximize your performance.

There’s an easy user interface that lets you see what’s starting up each time Windows does, and you can remove or disable them as you see fit. In some cases, the change can be so dramatic, that it will feel like you’ve got a new computer at your desk.

After my recent hard drive loss I had to reinstall windows, and after completion, here’s everything that Winpatrol helped me disable with a simple click of the mouse. Do you think my performance improved?

Choosing to “disable” something doesn’t remove any functionality from your system, it just prevents it from starting up when your system boots, so things can be started manually, if needed. If you’re not sure what something is, there’s an info screen that tells more about each individual item, like the company name and when it was added to your system.

The free version gives the same full functionality as the paid version, but the paid version has a few benefits, including access to a massive knowledgebase about nearly every program under the sun, and “real time” infiltration detection. True geeks like me will want that stuff, but for most people, the free version is everything they could want. (Personally, I still think he gives away far too much for free, but it’s gained him quite a huge fan base)

It’s very easy to figure out, with an intuitive user interface, and a quick and easy setup. However, if you are a complete beginner, here’s a link to a short video demonstrating how I downloaded, installed, and configured it on a system recently. The video is in Flash, and will open in another window.

When I was interviewed by a local television station a few years ago on the dangers of spyware and how users could control it, I recommend the Winpatrol program on the air, and it turned out that Bill Pytlovani (the company owner) had a daughter that lived here in Portland. After seeing the on the news, she phoned him, and he got in touch with me.

Ever since then we’ve stayed in touch on and off, and I remain a big fan to this day. Here’s a link to Bill’s blog, and here’s a direct download link to the free 2008 version of his software, which I am 100% certain will improve your computers performance. Try it, and please comment here and tell me what you think!

Here’s what I went through on Christmas Day, just to get songs we legally purchased through Itunes to play on my kids new MP3 players…

I will never spend another dollar with Itunes after what I went through. Tell me again why anyone would pay $.99 a song, only to (eventually) figure out that you’re not allowed to listen to them on any device other than an Apple brand music player?

This is so wrong, and I can’t believe there isn’t more fuss about this, and some consumer backlash. Who does Apple think they are, Microsoft?

Anyway, my kids received Creative Labs brand MP3 players for Christmas, and they also each received a $15 Apple music gift card.

After painstakingly helping them through the process of installing iTunes on their computer, which is mandatory just to spend the gift certificates, we sorted through hundreds of songs choosing what music to buy. I had to listen to samples from Hannah Montana, Alvin and the Chipmunks, and the Jonas Brothers until my ears were bleeding, but we finally completed the process and had all 30 of our songs downloaded.

Then came my attempt to get the music onto their MP3 players, where I finally figured out that it could not be done with that music. I was shocked! What kind of crap is that? Ultimately, I had to jump through several hoops to make it happen.

In the end, here are the steps, and as far as I can tell, there is no simpler way, but it still sucks, having to burn and then throw away perfectly good CDs.

• Buy music from the proprietary format ripoff music vendor (a.k.a. Apple)
• From inside the application of the forced download of Itunes, assign all of your desired music to one playlist
• After selecting the play list, highlight all songs with Ctrl – A on your keyboard, and hit the “Burn Disk” button in the bottom right of the software.

• Insert your blank CD, and go to the process of burning your music to a CD you’ll never need. Too many songs may require multiple CDs, but they can all be done in succession.
• After all of your music is on CDs, uninstall iTunes so you never make this mistake again (this step is optional)
• Open Windows Media player (I’m running version 10) – , and maximize the window so you can see the menus at the top.
• Go to Tools > Options and select the “Rip Music” tab from the menu. Pay close attention to the location you’re going to “rip” music to so you can find it again.
• In the “rip settings” pulldown menu, instead of the default Windows Audio, and hit “apply”. I also chose to check the box that said, “Rip CD when inserted”.

• Assuming you have the CD in already,go to the main “Rip” tab in Windows media player, and highlight all (Ctrl-A) of your selected songs.
• Hit the “rip music” button at the top right of your screen, and in just a few minutes you’ll have all of your music back off of your CD, and ripped into MP3 format, at which point you can use your regular software that came with your MP3 player to import your music.

This ridiculous limitation by Apple serves what purpose exactly, other than to alienate me as a customer?

If I had known ahead of time that the music could not be played on a regular MP3 player, then I would’ve bought it elsewhere in a standard MP3 format, and I’ll never again buy music from Apple. Why is there no warning on their website and on gift cards people buy that the music use is limited?

One note of caution is that this process completely removes all of the song information, such as title and artist. For my own kids it didn’t matter, since their MP3 players had no screen for selecting songs, but for someone who wants to be able to see and select what song they are going to play on their MP3 player that would be frustrating.

If I had wanted to retain my song information, (which I bought and paid for legally), I would’ve had to use a third party program to outsmart Apple at its own game, and remove Apples DRM (Digital Rights Management)and I’ve been led to believe that one of the best is called Tunebite.

Instead of using that I’ll just choose to never give the Apple music store another dollar of mine, and instead whether for my own video Ipod, or for the kids songs, I’ll use one of the many other music services that sell you music you can play on any MP3 player, such as…

MP3.com , or Legalsounds.com, or Emusic.com, or Napster or Buy.com or Magnatune or MP3 Ninja or 100 others. Perhaps I’ll even use Walmart, where it’s only 54 cents a song, but after forcing me to waste my time on Christmas, (and today writing this blog post), iTunes is dead to me forever.

Virus Marketing -

When I ran a computer store in the late 90′s, a lot of people would bring in computers with viruses and spyware to be removed, and they would usually ask us what the “point” was in these acts of cyber vandalism.

Other than sending out e-mail blasts and infecting other users, or destroying data on the machines most of the viruses were just a nuisance and served no purpose other than to annoy.

Early in the century, spyware started getting more intelligent, with key loggers and data miners routinely packaged with “free software” that started gathering credit card numbers and other sensitive information from people’s computers. In other words, the cyber vandals figured out how to begin making a profit.

Well now, a new opportunity appears to have opened up for in the form of a Trojan that hijacks Google’s text ads and replaces them with ads from a different provider.

According to Media Post this morning, it was discovered by BitDefender, and was -  “identified as Trojan.Qhost.WU, causes an infected computer’s browser to read ads from a server at a “replacement address” instead of from Google.”

At this point Google has not yet commented on their blog, but I expect them to soon.

It should go without saying that you need to protect yourself from viruses and spyware, but since I was in the computer repair business for year,  I know that it needs SHOUTING…Protect yourself from spyware and viruses

I wonder how you sign your business up for the Trojan ad programs?

Google has the ability to Mark your search listings with a warning to users if they think you are doing something wrong, or trying to download spyware onto people’s computer when they visit. You may not even know they’re doing it until you see it, and worse, you may not know if your site is even compromised until they do!

When someone tries to click on your SERP link, it takes them to a secondary page where Google tries to talk them out of going to your website. How do you think that fares for conversions?

If you do a search on Google today for SEO consultant, you’ll see Shimon Sandler, a well respected name in the search marketing industry, listed on page one. I regularly catch up on his blog by being subscribed to his RSS feed.

Today in my feedreader I saw a post titled, “Google is Doing Automated Mass Blackballing” – so naturally I took a look, assuming it was a paid links thing (wouldn’t you?).

In the post he explains that Google is suddenly marking his search results with a warning:

Being curious, I clicked the link anyway, and the first place I was taken was to a Google interstitial warning page – (at the time it told me there was no problem)

That led me to here at Stop Badware – where they were telling me there was no report of any problem there at the time.

Since I was feeling brave, I manually proceeded to his domain anyway, and this is what I saw at the top of the browser window:

I commented on his post showing him how his website had suddenly changed my hosts file (!), and then we had a couple of e-mails back and forth, and ultimately here’s a summary of what I recommended by email -

Here’s what it means –

Here’s the thread that led me there -

Here’s my advice to stop it –

1. Change webhosting control panel access and FTP username passwords and evaluate who you give access to

 

2. As the domain owner, you need to visit here (Stop Badware) and follow the directions to request a site security review – the point being, we want to know if it’s really gone.

3. Get back in touch later today

Ultimately, his web host was able to restore from a backup, and they do believe the offending program is gone, so if you want more details, you can read his post.

He did give me permission to blog this, but I still don’t want to say exactly what happened – I’m not even positive – just a hunch – but I can tell everyone else this…

You should go check your installations of any open-source products for security holes ASAP, because that can be a real traffic killer.

There has been a huge increase in the number of viruses I have been receiving via e-mail over the past 2 1/2 weeks. At first I thought it was just me, but an Oregon Computer Consultants meeting the other night, I asked around, and others had noticed the same trend.

“Internet marketing” is being  sold to uneducated businesses in the form of spyware and ad ware so it is becoming even more pervasive.

The salespeople for these “Internet advertising programs” claim that their software is not adware or spyware, and promise to deliver traffic to their websites, so businesses are signing up to advertise with these companies.

I’m not going to name specific advertising programs here, but know this without a doubt…

If someone is trying to sell you internet advertising of any sort, but wants you to install something so they can demonstrate how effective their advertising is, then it is adware by very definition.

Just because the “free toolbar” that causes your ad to appear may “help locate sex offenders” or “tell you the weather”, doesn’t make it any less intrusive when it comes to your system resources or your privacy.

I’ve had pointless arguments with sales reps that think it’s perfectly okay to advertise like this, just because it’s defined in the user agreement.

We all know that nobody reads and they simply click “next”, “next” to get their free screensaver, or free Internet explorer toolbar.

Do you want your business to “appear at the top of the search results pages” only for people who have installed their adware?

Then by all means, go sign up for their program. It’s  actually very effective.  If your target customer is actually an idiot,  and can’t tell the difference between normal Internet use and ad banners that “overlay” their legitimate search results screens.

As a computer user, you really need to be smart about what you choose to install, and what you allow to run on your computer, to avoid giving up valuable resources and privacy information.

Key loggers that steal credit cards and passwords are being written by junior high kids now, and there’s absolutely no excuse for not protecting yourself when there are such good resources available at no charge (for home users) -

Every single day, I get several e-mails with file attachments, and innocent sounding subject names. Some are even disguised as requests for service or quotes, and if it wasn’t for my antivirus program pegging them, I would most certainly open them out of curiosity about new business.

Whatever you do, make 100% sure that your antivirus software is updated and current.

You should also run a full scan of your system with Spybot. Even though I use a startup manager, and I thought I was spyware free, I just ran it and found 135 different infections detected, including all the cookies! I admit I haven’t been as diligent as I should be in running a spyware scan, but 135!?

(Yes I’m embarrassed to admit that, so please don’t bother leaving a comment that says “I should be”)

I also recommend using a startup manager, so that you know exactly what is running on your computer at all times, and you can be alerted if anything attempts to add itself to your start up.

Virus and spyware developers are becoming smarter, and even large reputable companies are advertising using certain applications that I consider to be spyware or adware. 

Free antivirus software – Avast
Free spyware removal and detection – Spybot
Free startup manager for Windows – Winpatrol

Someone sent me a link to this post, and I found it extremely interesting. According to the article, Google is following and factoring “no followed” links for ranking purposes.

Back in November, “no follow” was given the white stamp of approval by Matt Cutts, and I heard him say with my own ears that Google will not follow them, or assign any Page Rank either.

The someone (braver than I am!) asked “What if you’re just trying to funnel your own Page Rank?” and Matt replied that it was fine. I wish I could quote him, but his basic response was that they don’t care, and it’s not considered “evil”.

Well, I have a nofollowed link to this same person that shared the article with me, and it’s been no followed since December 2006.

Around February, we noticed that this particular link finally stopped being counted in his inbound link count.

After reading that post today, he noticed that Google was again counting my “no followed link in his link:site.com.

I know that this isolated incident is hardly conclusive evidence that Google is following no follows, but facts are facts. Google links are being followed and counted again, that’s worth knowing…

By the way, here’s the guy who sent me the story (no followed of course)

While I’m flattered that someone thinks enough of my content to steal it right off my webpage and post it as their own, I’ve never actually had it happen with my website copy before. It’s happened with the occasional article I’ve written, but nothing else.

Now though, it appears that there is an “Internet consultant” named Jeff Rodgers in Medford, Oregon, that has done just that. He took text from the home page of my site, and posted it on the home page of his site practically verbatim. You can see the evidence of his “crime”here.

To make matters worse, he’s stolen content from other websites too, and he even stole the client testimonials page from another company (Spartan Internet). He did that without even bothering to even change the client’s names, which shows that he’s not only unethical, but amazingly lazy too! You can see that evidence here.

Now what can I do?

I found some great information on a couple of websites, that outline a step-by-step process I could take, assuming that I had the time.

Rather than steal their content, I’ll just give you a link back to Barry Schwartz’s post at Search Engine Roundtable which has links to some other great resources, and also links to report the offenders to Google, Yahoo and MSN. I’ll also provide a link to Google’s own section about the DMCA, Digital Millenium Copyright Act

In my own case, I think it’s more entertaining to just blog about weasels like this, who give legitimate consultants a bad name. However, since it’s my home page, I’d better do something. In the meantime, please be sure not to take any inappropriate retaliation against this guy…

Jeff Rodgers – Rodgers Media Group – Medford Oregon – 541-326-0610 – jeff@jeffrodgers.biz – and fax 801-937-2603

(By the way, I found this guy using a new free plagiarism checker that was recently developed by Garry Egan – thanks Garry!)

I can’t believe I fell for it. One of my MSN Messenger contacts APPARENTLY sent me a chat message, saying this…

Surfing the web Ive found this useful tool in http//Get-Messenger.com/?en
Just entering your MSN Messenger account you can find out who has removed you from his/her contact list.I hope you find it useful!

It sounded worth checking out, so I clicked the link, (the colon is removed above) and tried the “service”. All is showed me after entring my Messenger ID and password was a list of my contacts, none showing as removed, so I just left, and signed back into MSN.

A minute later, I got that message from someone else too, verbatim. I instantly realized what had happened, (SCAM) and then realized that my MSN password was now out there.

Less than a minute after that, the second “sender” of the message asked ME where I had gotten the link, and I realized that HE had just gotten the message too, apparently from me.  Awwww.
I had to hunt a bit to be able to find out where to change my password for MSN messenger, and I finally found it here.

https://account.live.com/

I’ve written articles warning people about junk like this, yet I fell for this one bigtime. This one’s going to spread like wildfire…

Today I got notified by a hosting customer that his website had their content and design copied and reposted under another domain name hosted elsewhere.

The copied domain is here – www.nim-company.com while the ORIGINAL design and content are here – www.webpositionexpert.com.

The original site is a friend with a business in Antigua, while the content and design thief is apparently named Robert Soloway, and is in my back yard, up in Washington State.

I googled his name, and this guy has apparently ticked off a lot of people. There’s a lot of information about him on the web, and someone even registered the domain name Solowaysucks.net with links to his other misdeeds.

In an attempt to help him remove the duplicate content from the Google index (yes, it’s in there) I sent him here, to report an offender to Google. They’re usually pretty quick to react to stuff like this in my experience.

He also had another question of legality, and while we were IM’ing each other, I ran across this excellent explanation of his options. If someone ever steals your content, this is a great reference page to review. Nice Job, Lori, (and I see you’re in our backyard too, up in Spokane, Wa.)

To say “spam is out of control” is not really accurate, so let me give you some figures that will put it in perspective.

For my own domain pdxtc.com, August 2006 brought me these numbers…

• 19,306 total incoming emails (and we only have 9 addresses!)
• 16,209 were identified and blocked as spam before a human ever saw them
• 102 of those blocked contained viruses
• 71 of those that were blocked contained “phishing” attacks
• Only 15.15%, (2,924) of the emails were deemed “legitimate”
• Of the “legitimate” emails that made it through, I can only guess at the number I’d have been better off without seeing!

In the past, I have recommended SpamArrest (and I still do) for users that have only 5 email addresses or less, and it’s still one of the best in my opinion, since you can block 100% of all the cr*p with a simple one time auto response, asking “are you human?” to the sender .

That’s not practical for a business that wants to protect it’s whole domain. The “user verification” option is fine for persinal mail, isn’t really acceptable in a corporate environment, and you need something more robust.

I have payed a monthly fee for years to protect my whole domain with Securence, and I’ve been very happy with it, practically never getting any “false positives” blocking mail that I want. however, in the past month I’ve had to go into my “quarantine” folder on their server four times looking for email that I was expecting, which turned out to be blocked.

Perhaps I’m a bit premature considering changing, but I thought I’d throw it out here…What mail management methods do you use to maintain your sanity?

When I saw the title of an SEOmoz blog post in my feedreader, I tried to make it the first story of the day. When I clicked to read it however, the article was gone. Hoping to read the cached copy, I searched on Google, but the text was not found.

Still, I was able to find it, and it was an interesting read. It was a “black hat” (claimed as research) step by step demonstration of an exploitation known as “URL injection” where it’s possible to use a websites own “search form” to create links on their site, pointed wherever they like.

The author gave 20 examples of having actually done so, on various government websites from the EPA to NASA, and the links are still there. At the Library of Congress, he even added a funny photo too.
The last paragraph of the story probably sums up why it was removed, where the author points out that if you can add any pictures and text you like to an official website, then it would be relatively easy to make up a phishing scam, posting the stolen data to the bad guys’ server, and the user would never even know they’d been scammed until it’s way too late.
This blog post was clearly a case of providing too much information that could be used for evil, and “hats off” so SEOmoz for removing it. Unfortunately, if I could still find it, so can the bad guys.

I’m not providing the link to the story for obvious reasons…

***update – They have put the post back up after checking with their attornies, but I have to disagree with this course of action. Just because you can legally  tell someone exactly how to build a bomb, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. It should generate a lot of inbound links though for SEOmoz…

My son and I briefly fell for a hoax email from one of his little league parents that claimed August 27th, the Red Planet would be spectacular, and visible wit hthe naked eye as large as the moon.

I actually put it in my Outlook calendar, then a minute later, it occurred to me that this was a forwarded email from a trusted friend, so there was no way it could possibly be true! Sure enough, I was right, it’s a hoax.